Short Stories

From the author of Crime and Punishment comes this remarkable collection of short fiction. A selection of ten compelling tales, steeped in Dostoyevsky's characteristic themes of spiritual torment and psychological struggle, evoke life in Czarist Russia. Featured stories include "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," "Bobok," "An Honest Thief," "An Unpleasant Predicament," "Another Man's...

Under the Deodars (published 1888) is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Table of Contents: The Education of Otis Yeere At the Pit's Mouth A Wayside Comedy The Hill of Illusion A Second-rate Woman Only a Subaltern In the Matter of a Private The Enlightenments of Pagett, M. P. External links

Twice-Told Tales is a short story collection in two volumes by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first was published in the spring of 1837, and the second in 1842. The stories had all been previously published in magazines and annuals, hence the name.  Hawthorne was encouraged by friend Horatio Bridge to collect these previously anonymous stories; Bridge offered $250 to cover the risk of the...

The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story) is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental. Presented in the first...

The Prussian Officer tells of a Captain and his orderly. Having wasted his youth gambling, the captain has been left with only his military career, and though he has taken on mistresses throughout his life, he remains single. His young orderly is involved in a relationship with a young woman, and the captain, feeling sexual tension towards the young man, prevents the orderly from engaging in the...

Swift took up his permanent residence in the Irish capital in 1714. The Harley Administration had fallen never to rise again. Harley himself was a prisoner in the Tower, and Bolingbroke a voluntary exile in France, and an open adherent of the Pretender. Swift came to Dublin to be met by the jeers of the populace, the suspicion of the government officials, and the polite indifference of his...

The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (published 1888) is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. The Phantom 'Rickshaw After an affair with a Mrs. Agnes Keith-Wessington in Simla, the narrator, Jack, repudiates her and eventually becomes engaged to Miss Kitty Mannering. Yet Mrs. Wessington continually reappears in Jack's life, begging him to reconsider, insisting that it was...

The Mysterious Stranger is the final novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it periodically from 1897 through 1908. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race". Twain wrote multiple versions of the story; each is unfinished and involves the character of "Satan".

I arrived in Dublin on the evening of the fifth of August, and drove to the residence of my uncle, the Cardinal Archbishop. He is like most of my family, deficient in feeling, and consequently averse to me personally. He lives in a dingy house, with a side-long view of the portico of his cathedral from the front windows, and of a monster national school from the back. My uncle maintains no...

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is a piece of short fiction by Mark Twain. It first appeared in Harper's Monthly in December 1899, and was subsequently published by Harper & Brothers in the collection The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches (1900). Twain actually encouraged it to be read as a replay of the Garden of Eden story in a satiric sense. Hadleyburg enjoys...

The Kreutzer Sonata (Russian: Крейцерова соната, Kreitzerova Sonata) is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, named after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. The novella was published in 1889 and promptly censored by the Russian authorities. The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the...

"The Country of the Blind" is a short story written by H. G. Wells. It was first published in the April 1904 issue of The Strand Magazine and included in a 1911 collection of Wells's short stories, The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. It is one of Wells's best known short stories, and features prominently in literature dealing with blindness. Wells later revised the story, with the...

The Bridge-Builders (1893) by the British writer Rudyard Kipling is an Indian story about the building of the "Kashi Bridge." The story mainly displays Kipling's mastery of the technical details and knowledge related to bridge building. His biographers agree that the author acquired this knowledge through interacting with British civil engineers who were assigned by the Crown to build numerous...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...